It is funny what information, absorbed in childhood, really sticks in your consciousness and then emerges at some time in your future to surprise and amuse you.
This could be a very early memory of a nursery rhyme, a story from a beloved book, a photograph of a memorable time, a bedtime prayer, a distinctive smell, a toy that featured in your life and a name or names.
I can recall at least one example from each of these archived memories.
The nursery rhyme must be 'Ring a Ring a Roses', an innocent sounding tone type poem always best sung in a large group of children but yet explained later in life as being about the Great Plague and how the next line
'a pocket full of poseys' showed how having a fragrant source about your person could mask the frighteningly horrific stench of death.
The story from a beloved book would have to be 'Peter's Happy Day' which I returned with from the Earls Court, London Motor Show in 1969, aged 6. This was a cautionary tale of being safe and protected from harm on the streets, at home and in all aspects of being a vulnerable child in a world hell bent on doing you a mischief. I always thought that it was written by someone called R Ospa. It was not until much later that I found out that the author was quite prolific in advisory publications but then again that is what the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents was formed to do.
The picture which persists in my memory would be of a photograph taken one Christmas morning when I must have been about 7 or 8 years old. It is an idyllic scene of me and my sisters amongst opened up and discarded presents in our living room. We are ecstatically happy to sit in the mess of wrapping paper and torn boxes and I am the proud recipient of a bright red painted metal pedal car. My sisters would dispute, even to this day, that it was a joint present but they were girls and I was not even sure, being wholly un-PC at an early age, if girls could own, let alone drive a vehicle.
The bedtime prayer is 'Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild' which accompanied me and my siblings to sleep every night and the singing of it by my parents represented the most reassuring and secure feeling that you could ever imagine or hope for as a small child, again in a world where there were bad things happening to those less fortunate than yourself.
The distinctive smell is actually a combination of two that always seemed to be present in our house. One was the ammonia steeped and quite oppressive smell of a home perm kit that would be a sign that our mother would soon be under the hairdryer and the other was Dettol, a strong antiseptic cleaning solution that was a must have in an environment where germs had a field day in the hair, on the skin and in the stomachs of children and every now and again would take the initiative in the form of head lice, infections and sickness and diarrhoea. Dettol in copious amounts either neat or diluted was strong enough to kill 99% of all known germs. It did not taste very nice either, I can vouch for that personally.
The toy that was important to me was my Action Man. I can clearly remember that I got him in 1970 because he came with an England World Cup Squad kit from that years tournament in Mexico. He went missing for a few weeks and I feared that he had fallen out of the car on a wee-wee stop in the countryside during what always seemed like a long journey to and from Grandparents who lived in Dunstable to our home in Suffolk. I did eventually find him squashed down behind the loose cushions in my parents VW Camper Van. We celebrated by putting on his best Lifeguards uniform complete with sword but no horse (Supplied Separately).
Two names that have gone down in family legend still cause me to grin and laugh. I do not know who they were or where they came from but suspect that they may have been contemporaries of my big sister, 2 years older than me. They were Helen Steggles and Trudi Bucket. My father always got a laugh by throwing their names into a family conversation when he was not sure of someone's name in the hordes of our friends who would descend on us to play on the Kelloggs token purchase climbing frame in the back garden.
These are strong memories, all of them ,but their quite mundane and harmless nature bears testimony to the fact that I had a very safe and privileged childhood with no worries or fears and just time a plenty to be a child and do all of the things that children are meant to do, mostly in my case in a faint cloud and odour of a branded disinfectant.
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